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Comment by everdev | Hacker News Reader

I'm no fan of Facebook and deleted my account years ago, but the flood of articles like these that are barely embarrassing since the major Cambridge Analytic embarrassment feels more like an agenda or piling on than newsworthy items.

There are many reasons to reduce or eliminate your time on FB, but this isn't one of them.

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On the contrary, everyone's willingness to accept this kind of behavior as normal indicates how far the Overton window has moved when it comes to the trustworthiness of our digital services. We need a collective effort to shift things back where they belong.

I disagree, privacy-conscious people have been warning that Facebook has been doing these things since forever, so people (especially here on HN) can't claim that they didn't know these things were going on. This is just the same old story: people being upset about the consequences of what they were warned about many many times.

I, too, wish for a better quality of collective decision-making on the part of humanity, but this seems to be how "we" do these things. "What, me worry?" is probably the central recurring theme of history, if you're inclined to look at things a certain way.

We also used to accept that negative reinforcement was part of this learning process, but now it's called victim blaming.

> privacy-conscious people have been warning

Saying. And what was said was obviously not heard. Tangibility helps any pitch. We shouldn’t fault people for agreeing later versus sooner; at the end of the day, agreement trumps the alternative.

Either Overton window does not mean what I think it means, or you misunderstood me. Sure, privacy-conscious people have been warning others about a whole bunch of things, but the general discourse has shifted, so those people were frequently treated almost like conspiracy theorists.

Besides, I'm not only talking about privacy, I'm talking about general loss of trustworthiness that comes from moving away from the "confederate Internet" towards the "feudal Internet". Back in the POP3 days, if the message got delivered to your mail client, the only way it got deleted would be because of something that you did (even if it's "fail to have backups when your machine caught fire"). Nowadays you have people acting like Facebook deleting a message from your "inbox" (not an e-mail inbox, but same terminology is being used) is not a big deal.

The rationale is: "Well of course they can do that, it's their server and their service." And that's precisely my point.

I feel like you're both right though. We can't claim we didn't know, but the fact that we accept this en masse is concerning.

The behaviour described in this article implies a culture willing to look one way for users and another way for themselves. That’s pertinent less to users and more to lawyers and lawmakers.

I dislike FB as much as the next dev here, but surely it's a widely accepted (and beneficial) practice that employees have special privileges in the apps they build. Imagine using this argument to say that Facebook couldn't shut down a page/group/account.

Yes, it is technically the same abilities being used. The reaction comes because of how they're used: to indiscriminately delete old messages that may potentially be harmful to themselves while not offering the same options to its users.

I disagree, this shows a strong pattern of "do as I say, not as I do" in term of privacy. And this is a prime example.

That’s because you misunderstand the intent of this pile-on. The intent is to ensure full compliance in 2020 elections.

Using bad arguments is rarely an effective way to get what you want.

In business. In politics it works.

> The intent is to ensure full compliance in 2020 elections.

I don't see how these actions help Facebook be compliant in any way.

I think he means "towing the (establishment/party) line", not "complying with regulations".

That’s exactly right.

Hardly, if we cannot retract our messages from Facebook, neither should they!

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